New Xbox 360 dashboard update starts rolling out today

My bad if this has been posted already. Wanted to share the news that the new Dashboard update should be slowly going to according to Major Nelson. Here is the full article he posted about it.

Many of you have been involved in the 2012 Xbox LIVE Update Public Beta and have been busy getting an early look at the latest Xbox LIVE features. Today we’re starting to roll out the official release of the update to Xbox LIVE subscribers around the world. To ensure a stable release, this will be a gradual deployment across subscribers and regions over the course of the next week. Our initial deployment will reach approximately three million consoles worldwide, with additional users being updated over the course of a couple weeks. Don’t panic if you don’t see an immediate update, just keep checking back in.

In this update, you will see the following features.

Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies channel and, in the US, a Sports destination.

Internet Explorer for Xbox. With Internet Explorer on Xbox, you can easily find and view internet content on the biggest screen in the house, including HTML5 videos.

Recommendations and Ratings. Recommendations will allow you to discover new favorites, generated based on a number of variables including the content you previously viewed, what your friends are consuming and what is most relevant and popular with our Xbox community. You can now rate content yourself and also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

Pinning. Pinning lets you personalize the dashboard by saving your favorite movies, TV shows, games, music, videos and websites right to the home screen. It’s as easy as opening an app or a favorite movie and clicking “pin.”

Recent. Previously called Quick Play, the Recent view gives you a list of movies, games, apps or other types of content that you most recently accessed on the console.

Enhanced Search. The last Xbox LIVE update brought Bing voice search to Xbox so you could use voice to search for movies, TV shows, actors, directors and artists. This year we added genre search to the list, so now you can search for action, comedy, romance, drama or sci-fi. Bing voice search now includes results for video across the Web, including YouTube.

What about Xbox SmartGlass? That’s coming too, but not until Windows 8 launches on October 26th. When the Xbox SmartGlass app launches on tablets, PCs and smartphones, it will include key foundational experiences for interacting with your Xbox 360, such as dashboard and app navigation and Internet Explorer control, like text input, scrolling and pinch and zoom.

Yesterday, we shared all the details about Xbox Music, our brand new digital music service. Xbox Music begins rolling out today on Xbox 360, it will launch with free streaming on all Windows 8 PCs and tablets on October 26th and Windows Phone 8 as devices arrive in market. Xbox Music combines all the different ways people love to enjoy music, creating the ultimate all-in-one music service.

Internet Explorer is actually pretty sweet for me, means I can watch Giant Bomb videos in my bed with the Xbox in my room now on the big screen. Also wished they would learn from IOS and Windows 8 metro to be able to customize your home screen so for example I could have all the things I actually use on the home page like My Games, IE, Gamespot, Youtube, Twitter feed, New Arcade Games and they should even add shit like Weather Widgets just make it alot more alive like Windows Phone UI

A bit. Pinning is actually a pretty legit feature. You can just "pin" something to your start page and not have to hunt around for it. Great choice for the Netfilx app, in my case.

By far the best feature is that it caches the games on your hard drive. Have you bought a whole mess of arcade titles, then go to My Games and have to wait for like 5 minutes while it reads everything? No longer. Same with going to your drive to delete stuff.

A bit. Pinning is actually a pretty legit feature. You can just "pin" something to your start page and not have to hunt around for it. Great choice for the Netfilx app, in my case.

By far the best feature is that it caches the games on your hard drive. Have you bought a whole mess of arcade titles, then go to My Games and have to wait for like 5 minutes while it reads everything? No longer. Same with going to your drive to delete stuff.

Holy shit thats what I have wanted since the NXE, Pinning the shit I actually use on home screen. Another cool thing to add to your profile is your Hall of Fame, say like you can choose any 5 achievements to display in there. For Example Mile High Club, 100% RDR etc.

Also Xbox Music could be pretty legit if it's like Spotify, if I could have that app cloud share across my PC, Xbox and WP7 it would probably replace spotify for me, which is more expensive than Xbox Gold for a year anyway. Also being able to incorparate this into custom playlists for FIFA would be so fucking sweet.

@BurningStickMan: Pinning is great, I have that on my Windows phone, can you remove adds with it? I doubt it, but I had to ask.

Remove ads? Oh hell no! I can't remember the pre-beta dashboard, but I think the ads are actually worse now. They're definitely on just about every page, down in the right corner. It's all flashy video shit, but at least it doesn't play audio until you move the selection over it. And since the ads are always on that same tile, and all the useful options are on the left, I just know never to look there now.

@ChadMasterFlash: I'd assume so. If not why bother putting in IE. Well HTML5 is supported so thats good enough.

I hadn't tried HTML5 because logging in and using the keyboard in IE is a pain.

is it like the Youtube search text, because that is the fucking worst. Would be cool to pin favourite websites to homescreen like WP7 so I can have GB on homescreen, just glad i have a chat pad.

It's a keyboard but not the normal xbox keyboard (which is now QWERTY) you have a little mouse cursor that you control with the right stick and it's super inaccurate and you have to use that to peck out words and websites.

@ChadMasterFlash: I'd assume so. If not why bother putting in IE. Well HTML5 is supported so thats good enough.

I hadn't tried HTML5 because logging in and using the keyboard in IE is a pain.

is it like the Youtube search text, because that is the fucking worst. Would be cool to pin favourite websites to homescreen like WP7 so I can have GB on homescreen, just glad i have a chat pad.

It's a keyboard but not the normal xbox keyboard (which is now QWERTY) you have a little mouse cursor that you control with the right stick and it's super inaccurate and you have to use that to peck out words and websites.

"Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies channel and, in the US, a Sports destination."

Damn Just what I want more tiles! but bummer about the no Sports outside of the US!..

What they need is an option upon first start-up "What do you use your Xbox for most? Games/ Movies/ TV" and then modify it to show what's most important to that person and BAM they solve one of there major problems..

A bit. Pinning is actually a pretty legit feature. You can just "pin" something to your start page and not have to hunt around for it. Great choice for the Netfilx app, in my case.

By far the best feature is that it caches the games on your hard drive. Have you bought a whole mess of arcade titles, then go to My Games and have to wait for like 5 minutes while it reads everything? No longer. Same with going to your drive to delete stuff.

A bit. Pinning is actually a pretty legit feature. You can just "pin" something to your start page and not have to hunt around for it. Great choice for the Netfilx app, in my case.

By far the best feature is that it caches the games on your hard drive. Have you bought a whole mess of arcade titles, then go to My Games and have to wait for like 5 minutes while it reads everything? No longer. Same with going to your drive to delete stuff.

Glad that they're letting you pin stuff to the dashboard now. Hated having to dig to find Amazon Video all the time. Also, it's funny that they changed Quick Play to Recent, because everyone knows Quick Play was anything but quick.

@Rotnac: If you live in Canada you should already know the region locked stuff is always like this. Because I live 10mins from Seattle things like Hulu, Netflix and a surprisingly large amount of internet content just doesn't exist to me cause of these regional laws and shit. The internet is still VERY much US centric and it's a shame that people 'think' it's not... only international people seem to understand that it's this way I guess.

Up side is things like ads are also region locked... haha.. which means I've never seen an ad on youtube, giantbomb (if I log out I still see no ads etc) or lots of other places simply because whatever peeps are in charge of selling ads on various sites don't sell ads that can play in canada and stuff like that.

@ajamafalous said:

@Hizang said:

@Demoskinos

@Hizang said:

Remember the old days, where you would turn it on and if a game was in it, it would just fucking go?

You...can still do that if you want.

Not on PS3 or Wii, I don't have a 360. But I'm not sure, I mean you turn it on and it goes straight to the game logo. I'm sure the 360 shows the 360 logo first, which isn't straight to the game.

What? That's like the dumbest splitting of hairs I've ever heard. Even the Gamecube showed the Gamecube logo before the game.

Lol yea, every console I've ever owned showed the console's logo before booting into the game... this guy is funny. Currently I don't try and boot directly into games though cause usually the game I wanna play is a downloadable from XBLA or something, so I hit the guide button then go to quickplay where all the games I usually play live. Sometimes it's hard to actually find a game I 'just' bought though, since sometimes it's not in recently downloaded and it's hard to tell what other location it should be in. These things should propagate the dashboard naturally, if I just bought new dlc for a game that game should be somewhere prominent on the main screen so I can jump in easily.

@DJJoeJoe: I guess I never really paid much attention since i have a US and Canadian Xbox Live account and almost never use my Kinect anymore. I also don't even have my Kinect turned on unless i manually turn it on. As for ads n such, I've only ever got ads on Youtube when I use Firefox. I have ABP on and I mostly use Chrome so I don't really see ads much or at all. I do still get ads on my dashboard even American stuff... like Presidential debates... joy!

The only thing that I've noticed that still makes no sense to me is being unable to access to things such as last.fm via XBL when I'm in Canada, while there's no issue with going onto their website. But this is old news.